historiographythe writing of history, especially the writing of history based on the critical examination of sources, the selection of particulars particular details from the authentic materials in those sources, and the synthesis of those particulars details into a narrative that will stand stands the test of critical methodsexamination. The term historiography also refers to the theory and history of historical writing.

Modern historians aim to reconstruct a record of human activities and to achieve a more profound understanding of them. This conception of their task is quite recent, dating from the development in the late 18th and early 19th centuries of scientific history, cultivated largely by professional historians“scientific” history and the simultaneous rise of history as an academic profession. It springs from an outlook that is very new in human experience: the assumption that the study of history is a natural, inevitable human activity. Before the late 18th century, historiography did not stand at the centre of any civilization. History was almost never an important part of regular education, and it never claimed to provide an interpretation of human life as a whole. This larger ambition was more appropriately the function of appropriate to religion, of philosophy, even and perhaps of poetry and other imaginative literature.

History of historiography

Ancient historiography

Greco-Roman era

The older, pre-18th-century outlook has been particularly well studied in the historiography of the ancient Greeks and Romans. But, although two of the most important ancient historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, wrote as early as the 5th century BC, when recorded Greek historiography was only just beginning, they had few successors of comparable quality. It is a symptom of the relative lack of importance attached in antiquity to this type of activity.

Ancient history was a branch of literature. The most appreciated historians were the writers who, like Thucydides, were able to touch on universal human problems or who, like the Roman author Tacitus (died c.AD 120), wrote in a dramatic way about important events or who, at least, attracted readers by their excellent style and skill in composition. Many of the works that lacked some of these literary qualities failed to survive.

About 1,000 ancient Greeks wrote in antiquity on historical subjects, but most of these writers are mere names. Many of the losses appear to have occurred in antiquity itself. Even historians of first rank have fared badly. Only in a few cases have complete texts of all their writings survived. Of the voluminous history of Polybius (covering originally the period 220–144 BC) only about one-third survives. Nearly half of Livy’s Roman history (originally covering the period 753–9 BC) is lost. The text that remains is reasonably good only through the efforts of a group of Roman aristocrats who, in about AD 500, were trying to salvage the chief glories of Roman literature. A considerable part of Tacitus is missing, and the surviving portions of his Annals and Histories (originally AD 14–96) derive from two unique manuscripts.

Herodotus, whom the Roman statesman Cicero called “the father of history,” came from the western coast of Asia Minor. The writers who preceded him were mainly Ionians from the Greek settlements in the same area. The origin of Greek historiography lies in the Ionian thought of the 6th century. The Ionian philosophers were doing something unprecedented: they were assuming that the universe is an intelligible whole and that through rational inquiries men might discover the general principles that govern it. Hecateus of Miletus, the most important Ionian predecessor of Herodotus, was applying the same critical spirit to the largely mythical Greek traditions when he wrote, early in the 5th century, “the stories of the Greeks are numerous and in my opinion ridiculous.” Herodotus was more of a traditionalist, but he introduced his work as an “inquiry” (historia).

Egyptian and Babylonian historiography

A glance at the older historiography of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the other peoples of the ancient Near East will heighten one’s appreciation of the novelty of the task undertaken by Herodotus. The kings of Egypt, of Babylonia and Assyria, and of the Hittites and the Persians all sought to preserve their glorious deeds for posterity in monumental inscriptions. The more important rulers also accumulated large archives, including both ordinary administrative documents and records specially commemorating their achievements. Some 20,000 clay tablets remain from the collections written for Ashurbanipal of Assyria (668–627 BC). Both in Egypt and in Babylonia lists of kings were kept in the temples, and these were sometimes supplemented by brief annals recording the principal events, though the hatred felt by certain rulers for their predecessors led to periodic destructions of older material. The exceptional meagreness of the narrative sources for Babylonian history before 747 BC seems due to the obliteration of the older annals by Nabonassar of Babylonia (ruled 747–734). Apart from changes in literary style, there was surprisingly little development over a period of more than 1,000 years in all these types of commemorative records. The inscriptions and temple records were normally intended to perpetuate the glory of the gods in whose service these rulers had accomplished great deeds. The names and dates of dynasties and of particular rulers can be reconstructed fairly adequately with the aid of these sources, but one cannot expect much accurate information about particular events. Nor, with rare exceptions, were those who had access to this material interested in using it to write continuous histories.

Herodotus and his immediate Ionian predecessors shared a very novel outlook. Its distinctive features were a lively curiosity and a capacity to treat sources in a critical spirit. Boundless curiosity about people and their diverse customs is one of the most endearing traits of Herodotus. Like other Greeks from western Asia Minor, he was particularly stimulated by contacts with the great Persian Empire, which offered opportunities for reasonably secure travel. The resultant immense widening of historical perspective is illustrated by a story told by Herodotus about Hecateus. When the latter assured the Egyptian priests at Thebes that he could trace his descent through 16 generations, the Egyptians showed him evidence of the descent of their high priests through 345 generations. Herodotus was the first to link his geographic inquiries with true history. His descriptions of the barbarian world that confronted the Greeks provided an introduction to the epic of the successful Greek resistance to the Persians.

Ancient history and biography

The types of history written by the ancient Greeks and Romans influenced profoundly all subsequent historiography down to the 18th century. In order to interpret sympathetically this classical historiography, it is necessary to bear in mind the literary conventions that governed this branch of literature. The ancient Greeks distinguished between history and biography. The origin of both forms can be traced back to at least the 5th century BC, and the differences between them were observed throughout antiquity. The writer of history was supposed to aim at giving a true story, but the biographer was entitled to treat historical personages in a manner that resembled legend. There existed, of course, some exceptions. The lives of the early Roman emperors written by Suetonius in the 2nd century AD, while conforming to the traditional, topical arrangement of biographies, constitute an unusually valuable historical source, especially for Augustus, whose correspondence is repeatedly quoted. Yet another distinction was drawn between history and the study of “antiquities,” to use a term employed by Varro (116–27 BC), perhaps the greatest of all the ancient Roman scholars. This distinction was already implicit in Aristotle’s contemptuous dismissal of history (in his Poetics) as a branch of literature dealing with the particular rather than with things of general significance. The histories he condemned provided chronological narratives of wars and political events. Aristotle and his disciples were engaged in several enterprises that they regarded as something quite different from history. For example, they embarked on the study of the constitutions of all the Greek states. Such work was to be based on systematic inquiries. The student of the “antiquities” tried to use a wider range of evidence than the sources normally consulted by the ancient historians, and he arranged his results systematically by topics.

In antiquity a writer of history was usually preoccupied at least as much with style as with content. A generation before Aristotle, the rules of rhetoric, as they might be applied to history, were fully elaborated by Isocrates, a teacher of rhetoric at Athens. Cicero tried (especially in his De oratore, 55 BC) to familiarize the Romans with these Isocratean precepts. History was to be written in a clear but solemn style, akin to fine oratory. The historian was to introduce all manner of literary embellishments but was also to stress the moral lessons of his story. At its worst this type of historiography could lead to serious misrepresentations of the past. Among the Roman historians, Livy (died AD 17) was an important practitioner of this kind of writing, which was particularly well suited to the patriotic myths that he was trying to immortalize, of a Rome that owed its magnificent destiny to the unique virtues of its citizens and the perfection of its antique institutions. Some outstanding historians, such as Polybius (2nd century BC) and Caesar (died 44 BC), eschewed these rhetorical precepts, but in all the ancient writers an important element of literary artifice was always present. This is one of the reasons why they offend modern standards, which demand absolute accuracy in the presentation of evidence. One of the most striking contrasts is the reluctance of the ancient historians to quote documents. Tacitus might rely heavily on the archives of the Roman Senate, but he never mentions his documentary sources. An inscription discovered at Lyons, France, preserves a speech delivered by the emperor Claudius to the Senate in AD 48, and it is clear that Tacitus utilized another version of the same text. His skill in using it is matched by the freedom with which he adapts it to suit his purpose.

Methods of Thucydides

The greatest and the most original achievement of the best Greek historians lay in their clear grasp of the need to distinguish truth from fiction and their conscious preoccupation with the methods of achieving this. This is admirably conveyed in a famous passage of Thucydides.

And with reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible. My conclusions have cost me some labour from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eye-witnesses, arising sometimes from deficient memory, sometimes from deficient impartiality.

His practice did not fully live up to this ideal, however. The greatest of his Greek successors, Polybius, is reasonably impartial, except in his treatment of some of the events in Greece. Among the Romans, the writing of history was chiefly the preserve of members of the senatorial class, who almost invariably had some personal axes to grind. But the correctness of the rules formulated by Thucydides was accepted, in principle, by most ancient historians.

Thucydides had deliberately restricted himself to the history of his own time, and many of the subsequent ancient historians did likewise. They could depend on their own experience or could question well-informed contemporaries. The surviving fragments of Livy relating to his own lifetime (64/59 BC–AD 17) are much more vivid and convincing than the earlier books of his history (surviving today only down to 167 BC). The tendency to prefer contemporary history was strengthened by the practical bent of many of these writers. Several ancient historians were men of action familiar with warfare and politics. Interested in history as a source of instruction for statesmen, they could write with authority only about wars and political transactions of their own time. Polybius, the exiled Achaean general and a great traveller, derides unpractical, sedentary historians such as Timaeus, who had been writing about the peoples of the western Mediterranean without stirring for 50 years from Athens.

The historians of antiquity were much less skillful in dealing with noncontemporary history, for which they relied on older historians. Where none was to be found, they felt lost, as Livy complains in the early portions of his Roman history. The modern recourse to non-narrative sources was alien to the habits of most ancient historians. They were usually incapable of doing this successfully, just as they were ill equipped to discuss critically the sources used by the older writers.

Herodotus chose for his theme the successful resistance of the Greeks against the Persians at the beginning of the 5th century BC. Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War, in which virtually all the Greek states became involved in the last decades of that century. These were limited subjects of obvious importance for which it was possible to find ample evidence. The strength of the ancient historians lay precisely in imposing an interesting pattern on the events of a selected period, usually contemporary or fairly recent, for which they had manageable sources. The best of them could thereby achieve a sense of dramatic unity and produce literary masterpieces. The speeches that Thucydides invented for some of the main protagonists in his story are artistically the most satisfying parts of his work, and at times they even seem to recapture the spirit of what might have been said on these occasions. In a superb writer like Tacitus, whose political career had included long periods of frustration and insecurity, one does not look for impartiality or for scrupulous truthfulness but, rather, for fascinating insights into what the development of Roman imperial power from Augustus to Domitian (the period AD 14–96) meant to the proud, sophisticated Roman aristocracy for whom he was writing.

Classical study of “antiquities”

The study of “antiquities,” as opposed to narrative history, did not normally produce works of literary merit, and this is probably the main reason why most of them disappeared. One important group of such writings originated with Aristotle and his collaborators, writing in the third quarter of the 4th century BC. They were interested in both literary “antiquities” and in the systematic study of the constitutions of Greek states. They had described 158 different constitutions, though only their account of Athens now survives. A comparison of its two main parts illustrates the contrast between the deficiencies of ancient historiography and the impressive achievements of the antiquarian researchers. In the introductory, historical section, Aristotle was baffled by the problem of dealing with the fairly remote past. For each particular period he tried to follow some contemporary sources. The resultant juxtaposition of several writers differing widely in their political outlook produced an account full of contradictions. The second part, however, containing a systematic description of the Athenian constitution, is a masterpiece of shrewd analysis, as are the empirical portions of Aristotle’s Politics (Books IV–VI), which are based on a wealth of concrete examples derived from the different Greek states.

Aristotle inspired in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC a great mass of philological and antiquarian research. The most important scholars were to be found in the new Hellenistic states, especially at Alexandria in Egypt and at Pergamum in Asia Minor. Among the surviving Hellenistic fragments, there are commentaries on Herodotus and Thucydides. The Hellenistic scholars were interested in many subjects connected with history and did pioneering work in chronology, geography, and topography. They were accustomed to using every kind of source and to quoting documents extensively. Their greatest Roman disciple was Varro, who tried to recover all the vestiges of the old Roman society and to make a systematic survey of Roman life based on the evidence provided by language, literature, religion, and ancient customs. Most of his writings have been lost, but he supplied the conjectural (though incorrect) date of 753 BC for the foundation of Rome and knowledge of the probable boundaries between some of the groups whose union produced the city of Rome. Unfortunately, antiquarian researches of such penetrating nature were almost never applied in antiquity to the writing of narrative histories.

Early Christian era

The triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire during the 4th century assured the predominance of a type of historiography radically different from the works of the pagan Greek and Roman historians. Its origins were Jewish. The Jews were the only people of antiquity who had the supreme religious duty of remembering the past because their traditional histories commemorated the working out of God’s plan for his chosen people. By contrast, no Greek ever heard his gods ordering him to remember. It was the duty of every Jew to be familiar with the Jewish sacred writings, which were ultimately gathered into what became the Old Testament. The writers of these biblical books only gave an authoritative version of what everybody was supposed to know, and they were only concerned with the selection of such facts as seemed relevant in interpreting God’s purpose. In addition, the Jews also cherished unwritten traditions. To quote Josephus, a Jewish historian of the 1st century AD, “what had not been written down, was yet entrusted to the collective memory of the people of Israel and especially of its priests.”

The Christians took over the Old Testament and added to it an additional body of sacred history. The writers of the four Gospels included in the New Testament were bearing witness to assured truths that the faithful ought to know, and no convincing reconstruction of historical facts is possible from these books of the New Testament. The only avowedly historical book in it is the Acts of the Apostles. The New Testament as a whole represents merely a selection from the early Christian writings. It includes only what conformed to the doctrine of the church when, later on, that doctrine became fixed in one form. Between the Acts of the Apostles, dating probably from the late 1st century, and the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea (died c. 340) and his contemporaries in the first quarter of the 4th century, there is an almost complete gap in Christian historiography.

For the Christian writers the story of Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels, represented the fulfillment of the prophecies that could be found in various parts of the Old Testament. The Jewish part of the Bible also assured for Christianity the authority of a long antiquity. The history contained in the two parts of the Bible, now indissolubly linked together, became the only authentic record of God’s revelation for mankind, dwarfing into insignificance all the records of other peoples and religious groups. The concept of a universal history had not been wholly unknown to the pagan world, but the Christians were the first to apply it effectively. Christian history had to be a universal history, though of a very peculiar sort, where only one sequence of privileged events, Jewish and Christian, deserved detailed record. The Christian claims must have seemed more extravagant to the pagans than even the Jewish ones. Thus Eusebius stated that the Christians were, in fact, born with the world, anticipating St. Augustine’s vision of the city of God existing since the beginning of time.

In defending their religion against hostile critics, the early Christians were forced to fit some pagan history into their universal scheme. This was achieved by means of universal chronologies from the creation of the world to each writer’s own time. The events of Jewish and Christian history were thus synchronized with the main dates of the pagan myth and history. Sextus Julius Africanus, who wrote in the early 3rd century, is the first Christian writer known to have attempted this feat. He allotted 6,000 years to the whole span of human history and placed the birth of Christ in the year 5500 from the creation of the world. This work provided the model for the more elaborate Chronographia (Chronicle) of Eusebius. It became the foundation for a long succession of Greek chronographies produced by Byzantine writers. A Latin adaptation by St. Jerome (died 419/420) was immensely influential in western Europe for more than 1,000 years. A modern scholar is filled with mingled admiration and despair at the ingenuity of Eusebius and of his more eminent successors and at the absurdity of many of their conclusions. But they did originate and impose on the world a unified scheme of universal chronology. The dating from the birth of Christ was introduced by Dionysius Exiguus, who wrote at Rome in the early 6th century, and it was successfully popularized in the 8th century by the English historian Bede.

The writing of history of their own time was not an essential task for the Christians of the 4th and 5th centuries. When they did so, they wrote primarily in defense of their religion against the pagan world or against rival Christian groups branded as heretical. All these histories belong to religious apologetics. They suffer from inevitable distortions in the choice of what should be mentioned and what must be suppressed, and they are often excessively unfair to outsiders and opponents. These faults were not uncommon among the classical historians, though the Christians were somewhat unusual in their extreme conviction that they alone must be right. A comparison between the Christian historians and an outstanding pagan writer, such as Ammianus Marcellinus (second half of the 4th century), who was very ready to admire those Christians who merited it, brings out the intolerance and narrowness of outlook of his Christian contemporaries.

Eusebius was the earliest and the most important of the Christian historians of the 4th century. He is quite frank about the practical and apologetic aims of his Historia ecclesiastica (written 312–324; Ecclesiastical History) designed to show how, through a long series of acts of Divine Providence, a Christian empire was finally brought into existence by Constantine. He admits that “we shall introduce into this history in general only those events which may be useful first to ourselves and afterward, to posterity.” This work, like his other historical writings, is a mixture of devout fiction and invaluable detail. But there is plenty of the latter in Ecclesiastical History. Contrary to the usual practice of the ancient historians, Eusebius tries to specify his sources, and he quotes from them extensively in order to document as fully as possible the developments that resulted in the triumph of Christianity. He provided in this respect a valuable model for his medieval successors. The most astonishing thing about Eusebius was his capacity to handle his sources critically, in matters where it seemed permissible to do so. In one passage of his Chronicle he sets aside the authority of St. Paul in favour of a piece of evidence contained in the Book of Judges. In later patristic literature nothing similar is found.

Biography, as it was habitually written in antiquity, could be readily adapted to Christian purposes. St. Jerome modelled himself on Suetonius in compiling the lives of 135 Christian writers (written in 392) as a way of demonstrating the high level of culture attained by his coreligionists. The ancient biographers had freely mingled fact with fiction for the edification of their readers and could be readily imitated by the writers of the lives of Christian saints. The life of St. Anthony of Egypt by St. Athanasius (mid-4th century) set the pattern for this most popular type of medieval literature.

St. Augustine, the greatest of the Latin Church Fathers of the 4th and 5th centuries, was certainly not concerned with writing of history in any ordinary sense of the term. In his De civitate Dei (City of God) he might invoke historical evidence to demonstrate the utter degradation of all the non-Christian societies, and he encouraged his pupil Orosius to develop this theme more fully in the latter’s Historiarum libri VII adversus paganos (Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, to 417). Nearly 200 manuscripts of Orosius have survived, testifying to the immense popularity of his work in the Middle Ages. Augustine’s greatest influence on historiography lay in his main message. His vision of the divine and the earthly cities confronting each other dominated the outlook of all the medieval Christian thinkers and profoundly affected their treatment of history. Within that divine plan for the world, purely secular history seemed an insignificant thing.

Early China

The preservation of some records of historical events can be traced in China to at least the early part of the 1st millennium BC. Confucius (551–479 BC) was credited, rightly or wrongly, in the later Chinese tradition with editing the annals of his native state of Lu. But the appearance of the first works fully deserving the name of histories resulted from the unification of China under a single ruler in 221 BC. The first such work to survive, the Shih chi (“Historical Records”), dates from c. 85 BC. Its author, Ssu-ma Ch’ien, is quite justifiably called the father of Chinese historiography. His history exhibits many of the main features of the later Chinese official histories as they continued to be written down to the deposition of the last Chinese imperial dynasty in 1911. Within this fairly unified tradition, China produced a mass of historical writings unequalled by any other country before modern times. Until the late 19th century, Japanese historiography formed an offshoot of this tradition.

Chinese scholars showed an interest in the history of China from the earliest times. According to the Chinese conception, history makes sense only if it can furnish practical directives for action or supply correct information upon which action can wisely be based. All the schools of Chinese thought quoted the lessons of history. Confucius, with his stress on the moral content of these lessons, formed part of this universal belief in the value of history. One of the duties inculcated by him was the scrupulous transmission of authentic records. When, some centuries after his death, the unified Imperial state began to recruit its bureaucracy among the Confucian scholars, the recording of all the necessary information and the careful preservation of records became one of the main functions of the Chinese government, both centrally and locally. A long series of official histories and of records connected with them has survived from the time of the T’ang dynasty (618–907) onward. From then on, the great bulk of Chinese history was written by bureaucrats for bureaucrats. From a practical point of view this immense body of historical writings fulfilled a very useful purpose. Such histories were bound to be highly stereotyped and restricted in content to what interested the higher officialdom. It is easy to condemn it by modern Western standards for its excessive preoccupation with concrete details and inability to produce works of wider synthesis. But this Chinese tradition did gradually evolve in the direction of greater rationality and subtlety. Its scope widened as the sphere of government expanded. Furthermore, within this tradition there appeared from time to time writers of genius, men of bold critical spirit, genuine historical insight, and overriding integrity. One of the greatest was Liu Chih-chi (661–721), the writer of the Shih t’ung, the first thorough treatise in Chinese, or any other language, on historical method, which also constituted in effect a history of Chinese historiography. He had a successor in Ssu-ma Kuang (1019–86), the author of the first fairly comprehensive general history of China (covering the years 403 BC–AD 959). In the 17th century a remarkable group of historical scholars virtually founded a school of critical Chinese philology. None of these writers succeeded in radically transforming Chinese historiography, but they created an increasingly sophisticated and critical tradition. Their successors in the 20th century assimilated some valuable features of modern Western historiography.

Medieval historiography

Europe from the 5th to the 11th century

The period stretching from the 5th to the 11th century was a time of very profound cultural decline in regions that had once constituted the western half of the Roman Empire. Almost all the inhabitants of these provinces again became illiterate. There are long periods for which there are virtually no narrative sources, and the bulk of surviving historical writings consists merely of meagre factual annals. Virtually all the writers were ecclesiastics, in marked contrast to the Byzantine lands, where a strong tradition of lay historiography persisted throughout the Middle Ages. The annalists and chroniclers of the West were predominantly monks, and their lack of experience of the secular world outside their cloisters made them into blinkered and unpractical historians. This was true even of Bede, an Anglo-Saxon monk, who was by far the greatest historian of the early Middle Ages.

All the historians of this period were seriously affected by the cultural decline around them. They were having to write in part for a more uncultured audience. Sulpicius Severus, probably the best Western historian of the early 5th century, still intended his Chronica (to 403) for educated Roman Christians, but his life of St. Martin of Tours is a piece of medieval hagiography. This model could inspire lives full of folklore and miracle, from which the real human personalities of the saints were almost wholly absent. The same duality of purpose is a notable feature of Bede’s voluminous writings. He explicitly recognized that he must adapt himself to his audience when he explained that he was writing in a simple Latin style so that he might be more easily understood by his Anglo-Saxonreaders. There is a marked contrast of tone between his theological and his historical writings. As a theologian, Bede follows Eusebius and the earlier Church Fathers in not exaggerating the frequency of miracles and in believing that they were most common in the earliest days of Christianity. But Bede’s lives of the English saints and his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People), covering chiefly the years 597–731, are full of miracles and visions. There is one or other on almost every page. It is possible that some of these incidents were included by Bede because he thought that his readers expected mentions of these familiar, traditional stories.

In preparing his historical works, Bede not only took great care to assemble the widest possible collection of sources but also tells the reader what he is using. In dedicating his Ecclesiastical History to King Ceolwulf of Northumbria, he requests that

in order to remove all occasions of doubt about those things I have written, either in your mind or in the minds of any others who listen to or read this history, I will make it my business to state briefly from what sources I have gained my information.

An impressive list follows, including mentions of documents copied for him by friends at Rome, Canterbury, and other places. Like Eusebius, on whom Bede modelled himself, he quotes some of the documents integrally. Bede’s methods of securing and recording information are so similar to the practices of modern historians and the judicious tone of his writing is so impressive that the reader is almost taken in into treating him as if he were a modern scholar. But Bede’s Ecclesiastical History was written as a work of edification in order to strengthen the faith of his readers in Divine Providence, through which, as he saw it, his Anglo-Saxon countrymen had been converted to Christianity. All matters not connected with his main theme are ignored. Bede’s handling of evidence on subjects that he regarded as embarrassing inspires mistrust. But these are small matters in comparison with the enormous mass of information that he alone has preserved and the encouragement that Bede continued to give for many centuries to the writing of history.

The influence of Bede and other Anglo-Saxon scholars was greatly felt during the later 8th and the 9th centuries in the Frankish kingdom, where under Charlemagne and his successor, Louis the Pious, there was a modest revival of historical writing. Besides the annals kept at various monasteries, which tended to convey information in a manner that suited the Frankish rulers, there were a few more ambitious ventures. The important Historia Langobardorum (History of the Lombards), written c. 774–785 by Paulus Diaconus, or Paul the Deacon, was the work of one of the best educated men of the time. Nithard, a grandson of Charlemagne, left an invaluable narrative of the disintegration of the Carolingian state during his lifetime. The work that exerted the greatest influence on the medieval writers of biographies was Einhard’s Vita Karoli Magni (written c. 830–833; Life of Charlemagne). The author was a leading official and a close companion of Charles, and his work was naturally intended as a eulogy of the great king. Einhard says that Charlemagne retreated safely from Spain, returning with his army safe and sound, except that on a ridge of the Pyrenees, on the way home, he happened to experience some small effects of Gascon perfidy. Nobody would gather from this that the Franks had narrowly escaped a major disaster. Einhard was merely echoing the story told in the semiofficial contemporary annals. Another source of distortion was Einhard’s use of a classical model, the Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius. The subject headings under which he described Charles and even the very words used were partly borrowed from the lives of Roman emperors, but his Charlemagne is probably in essentials an authentic and credible portrait.

If bulk alone is to be taken as a criterion, annals were the main product of medieval historiography. The annalist merely sets down the most important events of the current year. In the case of the earliest medieval annals, the events were often noted down in Easter tables, in the blank spaces between the dates calculated for the forthcoming Easters. Such paschal annals would be extremely brief. When, as often happened, annals came to be written down in separate manuscripts, distinct from the Easter tables, there was room for the expansion of individual entries. In either case, the resultant annals cannot be regarded as history since the events are necessarily recorded in isolation. But they preserve in a right order the essential facts, which could be rearranged into a continuous narrative. Such a narrative, if it still followed the chronological arrangement of its various annalistic sources, should properly be termed a chronicle.

Medieval historians show little awareness of the process of historical change. They were unable to imagine that any earlier age was substantially different from their own. The unawareness of the meaning of anachronism helps to explain the strange wanderings of medieval annals and chronicles. If a religious community wanted to acquire a historical narrative, it copied some work that happened to be most readily accessible. A continuation might then be added at the manuscript’s new abode, and, later on, this composite version might be copied and further altered by a succession of other writers. Hence there are at least six main versions of the annals known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. They all derive from the annals kept down to 892 at Winchester, the West Saxon capital. Thereafter, copies were acquired by religious centres in the most diverse parts of England, and one manuscript was being kept up to date at the abbey of Peterborough as late as 1154. An extreme case of wanderings is represented by the annals of the cathedral church of Cracow, the medieval Polish capital. The first section is based on Orosius, the next comprises annals beginning with the death of Bede and containing notices of Frankish and German events, while the Polish section starts with the conversion of Poland to Christianity (965–966) and ends in the 13th century.

Europe from the 12th to the 14th century

Historians are accustomed to regarding the late 11th and 12th centuries as an age of intensified progress in culture and learning; this development, however, did not greatly affect historiography. There was a modest revival of interest in some of the ancient Latin writers, but would-be historians were unsure which ancient models they ought to imitate. A whole series of attempts was made to apply to other races the theme in Virgil’s Aeneid of a noble group of people guided by the gods toward a splendid destiny. The first essential step was to establish the descent of one’s nation from the ancient Trojans and then to trace subsequent history through a series of heroic conquests. The most ambitious of these writings was the Historia regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), by Geoffrey of Monmouth (died 1155), which attempted to establish for the Celts a historical destiny greater than any other. Although some, even contemporary, readers were not deceived by the work, and William of Newburgh, one of the best English historians of the 12th century, denounced it as a tissue of absurdities, many seriously accepted it as history.

With a few exceptions, the ablest minds of the 12th century were attracted into enterprises that ignored history; they were more concerned with systematization of thought and with philosophical speculations. One of the exceptions was Otto, bishop of Freising, in Bavaria. He was a grandson of the Holy Roman emperor Henry IV. He received the best education that his age could give, but he was also briefly a Cistercian monk during the most austere period of that order’s history. Otto was torn between conflicting impulses to seek the city of God as the only reality and yet to hope for the progress of the German empire. Out of this conflict came his first work, Chronica (The Two Cities), a chronicle of world history to 1146, perhaps the most profound medieval attempt at a Christian philosophy of history. As Otto himself confessed, it was composed “in bitterness of spirit . . . in the manner of tragedy.” The election in 1152 of his nephew and friend Frederick Barbarossa, as emperor, filled Otto with a new elation. The excellence of his second work, Gesta Friderici I imperatoris (The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa), derives in a considerable measure from a quality rare in medieval historians, a sense of optimistic belief in the value of writing history because it might become a record of human progress. The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa contains a penetrating analysis of the problems encountered by the German rulers in trying to rule the precociously urbanized Italian society.

As in antiquity, the best medieval works were accounts of contemporary history by men who had participated in the events that they were describing. It is, however, very significant that some of the writers that are prized most highly today survive in only very few manuscripts and were presumably not appreciated by most of their contemporaries. One such work was the Historia pontificalis (“Pontifical History”) covering the period 1148–52, of John of Salisbury, one of the most accomplished scholars of his age, who was writing about the period when he was in the papal service. Another instance of undeserved neglect is furnished by the Liber de regno Siciliae (“Book of the Kingdom of Sicily”) covering the period 1154–69, written by an anonymous member of the Sicilian court.

Unlike the ancient historians, the medieval writers of contemporary history had no inhibitions about extensively quoting official documents. In England, a succession of writers preserved a large quantity of such texts. Roger of Hoveden was, in the last quarter of the 12th century, treated by the English kings as a kind of court historian. He preserved valuable legal and administrative records with which he was familiar through his activities as a royal official and justice. Matthew Paris, the most important English monastic historian of the 13th century, was highly regarded by King Henry III and had excellent sources of information. He left behind a collection of transcripts of royal and ecclesiastical documents that today fills a large printed volume. Some writers made their chronicles into an anthology of official records, thinly connected by the author’s brief comments. Such is the chronicle of Robert of Avesbury, consisting mainly of the military dispatches of King Edward III and other interesting documents to 1356. Another variant of the same method was for a wholly mediocre chronicle to incorporate exciting pieces of eyewitness narratives by other writers. A dull English monastic product of the late 14th century, the Anonimalle Chronicle, includes a narrative of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which is one of the most dramatic and interesting eyewitness accounts to be found in medieval historiography.

The most popular histories of the 13th and 14th centuries were encyclopaedic compilations giving all the important facts neatly arranged under the dates of popes, emperors, and other rulers. There were even more ambitious ventures aiming at summarizing all the important facts from all the different branches of human activity. The Dominican Order, created at the beginning of the 13th century, was especially concerned with producing such aids for the dissemination of useful knowledge. The best known of these Dominican works is the immense Speculum historiale (“Mirror of History”), by Vincent of Beauvais, written under the patronage of King Louis IX of France. It is a compilation made up of excerpts from many authors.

The 13th and 14th centuries were not a period of any fundamental innovations in the techniques and nature of historiography, but there was a growing diversity of types of historical writing. Very detailed, chatty narratives multiplied, often badly organized and inaccurate, but conveying the authentic atmosphere of the times and vividly portraying leading personalities. Such were the St. Albans chronicles of Matthew Paris (to 1259), the reminiscences of Joinville about St. Louis during the Seventh Crusade (1248–54), the Lombard chronicle of Fra Salimbene (to 1287), or the vast history of the first part of the Hundred Years’ War written in the second half of the 14th century by Froissart. Memoirs and histories written in vernacular languages, such as those of Joinville and Froissart, came to be quite common. Laymen began to write histories. Some were great men, like Geoffroi de Villehardouin, one of the leaders of the Fourth Crusade (which captured Constantinople 1202–04), of which he wrote an account. Important urban chronicles began to appear, such as the Florentine chronicle of Giovanni Villani, with its invaluable statistics of Florentine population and activities around 1338. The extraordinary personality of St. Francis, who died in 1226, inspired lives of him more convincingly human than any previous medieval biographies of saints.

The Humanist historians of the 15th century tried to make a deliberate break with the tradition of medieval historiography. By their insistence on a more coherent arrangement of subject matter, by their superior critical outlook, and, above all, by their much more accurate awareness of the process of historical change, they had introduced innovations of fundamental importance. In part they owed their grasp of these new possibilities to the influence of Byzantine scholars. In historiography, as in other matters, the new humanistic scholarship was a joint product of Western and Byzantine traditions.

Byzantine historiography

During the millennium that elapsed between the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West in the 5th century AD and the Italian Renaissance of the 15th century, in no part of Europe did the writers of history consistently maintain as high a standard of achievement as in the Byzantine Empire. Parts of the 7th and the 8th centuries form lengthy gaps in the record of Byzantine historiography, but this seems mainly to be the result of subsequent losses of manuscripts. When, in the middle of the 9th century, Photius, future patriarch of Constantinople, compiled a record of some 280 books that he had read, he mentioned works of 33 Greek historians, dating mostly from the late Roman Empire and the Byzantine period, 20 of which are now lost. But, among the Byzantines of the 7th and 8th centuries, there was certainly no parallel to the Dark Ages in western Europe.

The Byzantine historians were heirs to the combined traditions of classical Greek writing, of the subsequent Hellenistic historiography, and of the Christian historical writing of the 4th century. Few ancient Latin historians were ever translated into Greek, and their influence on the Byzantines was, therefore, very slight. The older classical Greek historians provided the Byzantines with their cherished models of language and style. Like all educated Byzantines, the historians continued for a millennium to write in a literary language that soon became unintelligible to the vast majority of their compatriots. Hence, from the 6th century onward, there appeared, side by side with the learned historiography, a succession of popular chronicles written in the ordinary language. Most of these popular writings form—in their prejudice, ignorance, and crudity—a startling contrast to the works of the more eminent classicizing historians, but they do provide valuable glimpses of the sort of hagiographical history, more religious myth than sober fact, that ordinary Byzantines apparently wanted to read.

Herodotus and Thucydides were frequently invoked by Byzantine historians as models of fine prose. The influence of these two writers on the substance of what was written usually remained slight and superficial, however. The only Byzantine writers who seriously modelled themselves on these two oldest Greek historians wrote during the 15th century. The earlier Byzantine historians owed most to Polybius and to the Greek biographer Plutarch (died c.AD 119), the two Hellenistic writers who had the greatest influence on Byzantine notions of how history and historical biography should be written.

Like Polybius, the majority of Byzantine historians, including most of the best ones, perferred to write about their own times; and within these limits they produced some real masterpieces. Unlike the majority of the ancient historians, Polybius had included much autobiographical detail, and his influence reinforced the readiness of the Byzantine historians to talk about themselves, thus providing abundant information about several of these authors. Their histories are likely to be one-sided and full of details about what interested them, while remaining silent about a great mass of other contemporary happenings. They are frequently gossipy and patently prejudiced, inspiring much less confidence than the austere, impartial writings of authors such as Thucydides. This is one of the main reasons why the Byzantine historians have often been excessively underestimated by modern readers. The bulk of the Byzantine contemporary histories were written by statesmen, high officials, and prelates—men with access to important information. They have to be used critically and cautiously but can be immensely valuable.

Priscus of Panium (c. 450), a member of a Byzantine embassy to Attila’s camp, is the best source of information about that terrible king of the Huns and his followers. A century later, the reconquest of Vandal Africa and of Ostrogothic Italy by the emperor Justinian was the main theme of the History of the Wars of Procopius, a leading civilian adviser of Belisarius, the Byzantine commander. Subsequently, Procopius also wrote a Historia arcana (Secret History), containing a horrible indictment of the activities of Justinian and Belisarius. Many of his details about the corruption at court and the oppressive nature of the government may be substantially correct. In the 11th century Michael Psellus, who wrote a history of his own times, was a leading Byzantine scholar and official, for a time even the chief adviser of emperors. His Chronographia is concerned almost entirely with the happenings at the Byzantine court and is one of the most gossipy and amusing narratives ever written on such a subject. His psychological insight and his lively and subtle style delighted the educated Byzantines. Anna Comnena, the daughter and biographer of the emperor Alexius I, greatly admired Psellus. Her own Alexiad is a much less fascinating work, but the recovery of the Byzantine power under her father provided her with an important theme.

The last, increasingly disastrous, centuries of Byzantine history are recorded by a series of scholarly and interesting historians. Nicetas Choniates, a high imperial official, provides a surprisingly balanced eyewitness account of the siege and capture of Constantinople by the forces of the Fourth Crusade (1202–04). George Acropolites, a leading adviser of the Greek emperors of Nicaea, carries the story from 1203 to the recapture of Constantinople by the Byzantines in 1261. The later 13th and 14th centuries are covered by a succession of writers deeply immersed in contemporary theological disputations. Perhaps the most readable of all Byzantine histories is the largely autobiographical work of the leading politician and emperor John VI (reigned 1347 to 1354), written after his deposition during his years of enforced retirement in a monastery. George Sphrantzes, a close friend of the last emperor, Constantine XI, included in his history an eyewitness account of the siege and capture of Constantinople by Mehmed II in 1453. Two of Sphrantzes’ contemporaries chose to write primarily about the Turks. Their methods place them among Renaissance historians. Laonicos Chalcocondyles wrote (in about 1464) an account of the rise of the Turkish state. He did so in the manner of Herodotus, with long digressions on various neighbouring nations. A little later, Critobulos of Imbros, in his account of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople, made Mehmed II his chief hero and modelled his history on Thucydides.

The study of what might be called “historical antiquities” was not much cultivated by Byzantine scholars. The most notable exception was the emperor Constantine VII, but only some fragments of his voluminous collections have survived (dating from about 940 to 959). They include a very interesting account of the various peoples with whom the Byzantines had to deal. Such ancient Greek literature as still survives, including that of all the historians, was preserved by the Byzantine scholars. When, around the year 1400, the teaching of Greek was introduced into Italian universities by Byzantine scholars, they brought also their superior techniques of literary scholarship, transforming thereby the study of Latin authors as well as introducing into western Europe the treasures of Greek literature. One result was the emergence of the new Renaissance historiography.

Muslim historiography

Muslim historiography appears to have originally developed independently of European influences. Until the 19th century Muslim writers only very seldom consulted Christian sources and almost never noted events in Christian countries. Fortunately, they displayed at times more curiosity about the non-Muslim peoples of Asia. The first and best history of the Mongol conquests in the first half of the 13th century was the work of a Persian, Joveynī. On a visit to Mongolia in 1252–53, he was able to consult the recently compiled, earliest Mongol narrative (Secret History of the Mongols).

The origins of Arabic historiography still remain obscure because of the gap between the legendary traditions of pre-Islāmic Arabia before the start of the Muslim era (AD 622) and the sophisticated and fairly exact chronicles that began to appear in the later 8th and 9th centuries. But while the detailed stages of this development still await reconstruction, the main influences shaping the early Muslim historiography are clear enough. As in the case of the ancient Jews, it was created and perpetuated by religion. Muḥammad (died 632) regarded himself as a successor to a long series of Jewish and Christian prophets, and he made Islām a religion with a strong sense of history. The Qurʾān, Islām’s holy book, is full of warnings derived from the lessons of history.

Teachings of Muḥammad not included in the Qurʾān came to be regarded after his death as authoritative tradition left behind by him. All his sayings and actions were therefore carefully treasured and ultimately came to form, in combination with the Qurʾān, the foundation for the body of Muslim law (Sharīʿah), common to all Islāmic communities. These traditions (Ḥadīth) were transmitted orally for several generations, until they were written down in the 8th and 9th centuries. The resultant collections were only partly historical, as myths and inventions crept into them. The scholars who were engaged in preserving and verifying these traditions were chiefly preoccupied with organizing them into legal and theological systems, and they were frequently hostile to the historians. The earliest authoritative life of Muḥammad, written by Ibn Isḥāq (died 768), was attacked by a leading exponent of the legal “traditionist” learning. This confirms the independence of the historical scholars from the theological and legal interests. But both groups shared some common materials, and the strict rules evolved by the legal “traditionists” for recording their sources and tracing a continuous chain of authoritative transmitters of the traditions encouraged similar exact habits in the Muslim historians. The resultant histories were often pedantic, full of unrelated facts, and deficient in reflective comment, though there are some astonishing exceptions, such as the writings of Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406). But the better Muslim historians scrupulously quoted their authorities and tried to be truthful. This was particularly true of the “classical” school of historians, who were writing at the centre of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate in Iraq in the 9th and 10th centuries. Aṭ-Ṭabarī (died 923), the most authoritative of them all, wrote his “History of Prophets and Kings” as a supplement to his earlier commentary on the Qurʾān, and subsequent Muslim historians were content to follow his reconstruction of the early Islāmic history. The Syrian and Iraqi historiography of the 12th and early 13th centuries is at least as valuable as the Western historical writing of this period, and sometimes it is clearly better.

To orthodox Muslims, the development of the Islāmic community represented a continuous manifestation of God’s purpose. Consequently, the recording of the religious progress of the Islāmic society continued to be sacred duty. One of the original features of Muslim historiography is the large amount of attention devoted to the lives of devout men and of scholars. To many Muslim historians, these spiritual and intellectual activities were of much greater importance than the doings of princes and warriors. One of the peculiarities of Muslim historiography was the liking for encyclopaedic dictionaries of famous men. The earliest of these were devoted to the Companions of Muḥammad and to the early transmitters of the Muslim traditions. For a thousand years extremely diverse types of biographical collections have continued to appear in the Muslim world. Those devoted to religious scholars attained a particularly wide diffusion. Saladin (Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn), who took Jerusalem from the crusaders in 1187 and later opposed the Third Crusade, offered to the Muslim writers the particularly congenial subject of a ruler dominated by a sense of religious duty. A particularly fine example of medieval Muslim historiography is the biography of Saladin by Bahāʾ ad-Dīn (died 1234), which gives an exceptional insight into Saladin’s motives for many of his critical decisions.

But the greatest Arab historian and one of the most penetrating thinkers about historiography in any time or place was undoubtedly Ibn Khaldūn. The introduction (al-Muqaddimah) to his Kitāb al-ʿibar, a universal history (begun in 1375), is, in A.J. Toynbee’s judgment (1934), “the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind.” Ibn Khaldūn had absorbed all the learning accessible to a Muslim of his time. He was a master of religious learning, an outstanding judge, a writer on logic. He turned a subtle and most disciplined mind to historiography in order to explain his personal tragedy. He had served a succession of rulers in Islāmic Spain and the Maghrib (Northwest Africa) as a general, a politician, and even once as a chief minister, and his activities had always ended in disaster. In order to explain what had gone wrong, he sought to achieve a correct understanding of the forces that governed the societies known to him. He concluded that political stability had become impossible in his native Maghrib, because over centuries economic prosperity had declined excessively and the forces of lawlessness had become too strong.

As a detailed chronicler of events Ibn Khaldūn is not always exact, but, like contemporary historians, he knew how to reconstruct correctly the main trends over several centuries. His ability to formulate general laws that govern the fate of societies and to establish rules for the criticism of sources provided him with an intelligent framework for the correct reconstruction of past history.

Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddimah has survived in at least a score of manuscripts, but he has had no effective influence on Muslim historiography until recently; after his time, as before, the writing of history continued to be a normal feature of Muslim civilization in the more advanced Islāmic societies. In several countries, notably in parts of India, the first works that deserve the name of history appeared only after the Muslim conquest or the conversion to Islām. After the 12th century Arabic ceased to be the main language of Muslim historiography. Distinguished histories were written in Persian in the 13th century, and subsequently Turkish and other vernaculars came to be used by historians in different parts of the Islāmic world. But, in its isolation from non-Muslim influences and its traditional interests, Islāmic historiography underwent no intrinsic change until the 19th century, when it began to be affected by the impact of modern Western civilization

All human cultures tell stories about the past. Deeds of ancestors, heroes, gods, or animals sacred to particular peoples were chanted and memorized long before there was any writing with which to record them. Their truth was authenticated by the very fact of their continued repetition. History, which may be defined as an account that purports to be true of events and ways of thinking and feeling in some part of the human past, stems from this archetypal human narrative activity.

While sharing a common ancestry with myth, legend, epic poetry, and the novel, history has of course diverged from these forms. Its claim to truth is based in part on the fact that all the persons or events it describes really existed or occurred at some time in the past. Historians can say nothing about these persons or events that cannot be supported, or at least suggested, by some kind of documentary evidence. Such evidence customarily takes the form of something written, such as a letter, a law, an administrative record, or the account of some previous historian. In addition, historians sometimes create their own evidence by interviewing people. In the 20th century the scope of historical evidence was greatly expanded to include, among many other things, aerial photographs, the rings of trees, old coins, clothes, motion pictures, and houses. Modern historians have determined the age of the Shroud of Turin, which purportedly bears the image of Jesus, through carbon-14 dating and have discredited the claim of Anna Anderson to be the grand duchess Anastasia, the daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, through DNA testing

Just as the methods at the disposal of historians have expanded, so have the subjects in they have become interested. Many of the indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, and Polynesia, for example, were long dismissed by Europeans as having no precolonial history, because they did not keep written records before the arrival of European explorers. However, sophisticated study of oral traditions, combined with advances in archaeology, has made it possible to discover a good deal about the civilizations and empires that flourished in these regions before European contact.

Historians have also studied new social classes. The earliest histories were mostly stories of disasters—floods, famines, and plagues—or of wars, including the statesmen and generals who figured in them. In the 20th century, however, historians shifted their focus from statesmen and generals to ordinary workers and soldiers. Until relatively recent times, however, most men and virtually all women were excluded from history because they were unable to write. Virtually all that was known about them passed through the filter of the attitudes of literate elites. The challenge of seeing through that filter has been met by historians in various ways. One way is to make use of nontraditional sources—for example, personal documents, such as wills or marriage contracts. Another is to look at the records of localities rather than of central governments.

Through these means even the most oppressed peoples—African-American slaves or medieval heretics, for example—have had at least some of their history restored. Since the 20th century some historians have also become interested in psychological repression—i.e., in attitudes and actions that require psychological insight and even diagnosis to recover and understand. For the first time, the claim of historians to deal with the feelings as well as the thoughts of people in any part of the human past has been made good.

None of this is to say that history writing has assumed a perfect or completed form. It will never do so: examination of its past reveals remarkable changes in historical consciousness rather than steady progress toward the standards of research and writing that represent the best that historians can do today. Nevertheless, 21st-century historians understand the pasts of more people more completely and more accurately than their predecessors did. This article demonstrates the scope of that accomplishment and how it came to be achieved.

Ancient historiography

The first histories

In the beginning was the spoken word. Humans lived for tens of thousands of years with language, and thus with tales about the past, but without writing. Oral history is still important in all parts of the world, and successful transmission of stories over many generations suggests that people without writing can have a sophisticated historical sense. The historical record, however, must start with a system of writing and a suitable writing technology. The earliest forms of writing included cuneiform and pictographs, which were inscribed on stone and clay tablets in Egypt and Mesopotamia, as well as Chinese ideograms, which were incised in bronze and on oracle bones (baked oxen bones whose cracks and fissures were thought to foretell the future). People in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China were the first to make records of their contemporaries, which took the form of lists of kings and ancestors.

Egypt and Mesopotamia

In Egypt, the first lists date from about the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE and extend back another 1,000 years to a time when kings were thought to mingle with gods. Entries were made year by year, making these lists among the earliest annals. In addition to the names of kings, events occasionally are mentioned, especially for the later years; but it is hard to understand on what principle they are included. Sandwiched between notations of offerings to the gods are such enigmatic references as “Smiting of the cave dwellers.” Despite their occasional obscurity, these early historians accomplished the considerable task of organizing the past into units of the same size (years) and assigning events to them.

The king-lists of the Sumerians, the oldest civilization in Mesopotamia, not only presented the order of rulers but described shifts in power as various kings were “smitten with weapons” and overthrown. The Sumerians were also capable of weaving events into a narrative. A Sumerian stela, or standing stone slab, dating from about 2,400 BCE records what is probably the world’s first historical narrative. The Stele of the Vultures was erected by the city of Lagash to commemorate its victory in a boundary war with Umma; it contains depictions of warriors in battle gear and an inscription celebrating the triumph.

Sumerian writers seem to have developed their own interpretation of history. This interpretation is reflected in the preoccupation of the king-lists with the transitory nature of royal power and in the Sumerian belief that natural phenomena (notably the behaviour of the Euphrates River) are determined by the gods. Although Sumerian gods could be bungling and cowardly and sometimes even subject to fate, they retained the power to punish humans who offended them. The vicissitudes of kings and states were thought to demonstrate the gods’ power to influence human affairs.

China

A rich and persistent annalistic tradition and a growing emphasis on history as a repertoire of moral examples characterized the earliest Chinese historiography. The first Chinese historians were apparently temple archivists; as the bureaucratic structure of the Chinese state developed, historians occupied high offices. History gained prestige through the thought of the philosopher Confucius (551–479 BCE), who was traditionally—though probably wrongly—credited with writing the Chunqiu (“Spring and Autumn [Annals]”) and the Shujing (“Classic of History”). As articulated in these works, Chinese historical thought was intensely moralistic: virtue was conceived as following the example of one’s ancestors. There was consistent interest in the form of governing institutions and frequent emphasis on the doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven—the idea that a monarch ruled by heaven’s decree, which would be withdrawn if he committed evil.

The foundational text of Chinese historiography is the Shiji (“Historical Records”), which was compiled by Sima Qian (c. 145–c. 86 BCE). It is an account of the entire history of China from mythical times through the establishment of the Han dynasty in 206 BCE. The story becomes more detailed as Sima Qian approaches his own time and is able to question eyewitnesses of events and make use of abundant official documents. Sima Qian introduced order into the welter of surviving records by organizing them into categories.

The classical Chinese historians made an ideal of objectivity. Although they eschewed interpretation of the historical record, they were often faced with conflicting sources. In such cases they typically chose only one, though they never referred to their sources or explained the choices they made. Historical criticism in China was constrained by propriety because of the high cultural value of ancestors; anything like the contentiousness of the Greeks would have been regarded as most unseemly (see below Greek historiography).

By about 710 CE, however, Liu Zhiji (661–721) had produced the Shitong (“Historical Perspectives”), the first comprehensive work on historical criticism in any language. For him, the writing of history had an exalted—and very Confucian—mission:

Man lives in his bodily shape between heaven and earth and his life is like the span of the summer fly, like the passing of a white colt glimpsed through a crack in the wall. Yet he is shamed to think that within those years his merit will not be known…there is truly none who is not tireless in pursuing merit and fame.…Why is this? Because all have their heart set on immortality. And what, then, is immortality? No more than to have one’s name written in a book.

Liu Zhiji’s view had a lasting influence. Indeed, some of his maxims are still recommended to beginning historians: skepticism about the sources, freedom from deference to established scholars, the necessity of extensive knowledge of the sources before selection can be made, and insistence on arguments supported by extensive evidence.

Hebrew traditions

The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) was as fundamental to Western historiography as the dynastic histories were to Chinese historiography. Although the Bible is many things, it is substantially a work of history. Seventeen of its 39 books are historical, and the 5 major and 12 minor prophets also offer moral interpretations of historical events. Furthermore, references in the Hebrew Bible indicate that annals of the Israelite kings once existed, though they have since been lost.

A creation story, an account of a flood that all but destroys humanity, long genealogical lists, a set of laws or commandments, and reflections on the effects of divine wrath on the prosperity of kings and peoples can be found among other Western Asian peoples. Nevertheless, the so-called Yahwist writer (one of the individuals or groups identified as a source of the Torah or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) possessed a unique conception of history, and the Hebrews identified themselves as a distinct people only because of that conception. They alone had entered into a covenant with Yahweh, who promised Abraham, the first of the Hebrew patriarchs, that his descendants would be as numerous as the sands of the sea. The Hebrews believed that the hand of Yahweh had led them to escape bondage in Egypt and eventually to subdue the peoples of Palestine in order to occupy the Promised Land.

That land was ill-chosen as a peaceful place to live. The Hebrews faced the constant threat of being squeezed between the great powers of the region. About 722 BCE the northern kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians, and about 598 BCE the southern kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonians, who carried many Hebrews off to captivity; the Babylonian Exile lasted until 538 BCE, when the Persian conquerors of Babylonia allowed the Hebrews to return to Jerusalem. The authors of the Hebrew Bible did not, however, think in geopolitical terms; they tried instead to understand why the promise, which seemed to guarantee earthly success, had apparently been abrogated by Yahweh.

Agonizing over this problem led to something hitherto unknown: a widespread reconception of the historical record. The compilers of the Hebrew scriptures had already rejected the sort of vainglorious boasting characteristic of the records of Babylonian kings. The succession story of King David, for example, does not spare details of his discreditable actions. More serious than any individual sin, however, were the sins committed by the Hebrew people as a whole, who are depicted on occasion as turning away from the worship of Yahweh. It was not unusual to see in the disasters that overwhelmed them the avenging hand of Yahweh, but what required historical reflection was the task of reconciling the apostasy and its punishment with the continuing validity of the promise made to Abraham. Eventually the major prophets, especially Isaiah, reinterpreted the story of their people. Despite the sins and sufferings of the people of Yahweh, the promise had not been invalidated and could even be renewed, because the people’s destiny had not been world power or even a secure kingdom. Instead they had been chosen to suffer as a servant of all of humanity.

This view was distinctive in being a history not merely of a single king or dynasty but of a people. Furthermore, it was not narrowly nationalistic; it extended back to the beginnings of the human race and showed how Yahweh, the Lord of the whole earth, was working out his divine plan for humanity through his promise to the chosen people. Unlike the historical vision of other Western Asian peoples, which had seldom extended far into the past or beyond their own ethnic group, the view of the Hebrews was in principle universal. Since the promise was capable of redefinition and renewal, there was even a rudimentary notion of history as progressive.

One element of modern historical scholarship that does not appear in the works of Western Asian peoples is criticism of sources. Babylonian records often end with elaborate curses against anyone who would seek to alter them. It was the classical Greek historians who first made a systematic attempt to find out what actually happened, rather than to preserve a traditional record of events.

Greek historiography

Greek historiography originated in the activities of a group of writers whom the Greeks called logographoi (“logographers”). Logography was the prose compilation of oral traditions relating to the origins of towns, peoples, and places. It combined geographical with cultural information and might be seen as an early form of cultural anthropology. Hecataeus of Miletus, the best known of the logographers, defined his task in his Genealogia (c. 490 BCE) as follows: “I write what I consider the truth, for the things the Greeks tell us are in my opinion full of contradictions and worthy to be laughed out of court.” The logographers also served as advocates and speech writers in the courts, and the need to ascertain facts and make arguments clearly influenced their writings.

Herodotus

Although the logographers pioneered in the study of history, their influence was eclipsed by Herodotus, who has been called the “father of history.” His History of the Greco-Persian Wars is the longest extant text in ancient Greek. The fact that it has survived when so many other works written in ancient Greece were lost, including the majority of the plays of the great tragedians (Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles) and much of the corpus of Aristotle), is testimony to the great esteem in which it was held.

Like the logographers, Herodotus’s approach was historical and anthropological. He questioned the priests at Memphis (in Egypt) and those at Heliopolis and Thebes “expressly to try whether the priests of those places [Heliopolis and Thebes] would agree in their accounts with the priests at Memphis.” He discovered that the Egyptian historical records went much further back than the Greek ones and that Egyptian customs were the reverse of those he knew (which he called “the common practice of mankind”). The Egyptians ate no wheat or barley; kneaded dough with their feet but mixed mud or even dung with their hands; lived with animals; and wrote from right to left. Herodotus also observed that “women attend the markets and trade, while the men sit at home at the loom.”

Although Herodotus also gave ethnographic details of this kind on the Scythians and the Persians, his History possesses a narrative thread, which he announces in the first paragraph: “These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feud.” The “grounds of feud” are traced back beyond the Trojan War (12th or 13th century BCE) to a series of abductions of women by both Europeans and Asians. The Greeks made themselves enemies of Persia (which claimed all of Asia) when they led an army to besiege the Anatolian city of Troy to recover Helen, the Greek woman kidnapped by the Trojan prince Paris. The rivalry was renewed in the time of the Persian king Xerxes, leading to an epic conflict between the enormous forces of Persia and those of Athens, Sparta, and most, though not all, of the other Greek city-states. The pattern of a nemesis upon the hubris of the Persians is obvious.

Despite his apparently conscientious questioning of his witnesses, Herodotus developed a reputation for credulity. However, although he was certainly not one to resist a good story, he did not endorse everything he reported. He described a story that the Greeks told about the mythical hero Heracles as a “silly fable” that reflected badly on their critical sense. In the tradition of the logographers, he believed that his duty was to record the traditions of various peoples, no matter how dubious. He combined a remarkable narrative artistry with an effort to discern the causes of customs and events.

Thucydides

The most famous critic—and emulator—of Herodotus was Thucydides (flourished 5th century BCE). Whereas Herodotus had hoped to preserve the glory of Greeks and barbarians from the destruction of time, Thucydides had little glory to celebrate. In his great work, the History of the Peloponnesian War, which describes the destructive conflict (431–404 BCE) between Athens and Sparta, Thucydides aimed “not to write down the first story that came my way, and not even to be guided by my own general impressions.” When reporting on events that he did not personally witness, he carefully checked the reports of eyewitnesses, bearing in mind their partiality and imperfect memories. “It may be,” he concedes,

that my history will be less easy to read because of the absence in it of a romantic element. It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events that happened in the past and that (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public but was done to last forever.

Behind this veiled criticism of Herodotus is the ambition to establish a diagnostic science of history. Just as Thucydides describes the symptoms of plague in Athens, so he clinically notes the degeneration of the Athenian body politic. The city’s highest ideals are articulated in the funeral oration that Thucydides attributes to the Athenian leader Pericles; its realpolitik is brutally illustrated in the city’s treatment of the inhabitants of the island of Melos. In the famous “Melian Dialogue,” the Athenians demand that the hitherto neutral Melians join their confederation. They offer no justification of their demand beyond their power to enforce it, warning the Melians against having any hope in portents or oracles. When the Melians refuse, the Athenians send a force so strong that the Melians surrender unconditionally, whereupon the Athenians massacre all the men of military age and sell the women and children into slavery.

The pathology of the Athenians is most clearly manifested in their disastrous expedition to Sicily. Persuaded by demagogues and by soothsayers and oracles that they will prevail, the Athenians attack the island and its chief city, Syracuse, without realizing that they are undertaking a war almost as demanding as that still under way against Sparta. The expedition goes badly: the entire Athenian army is killed or captured and the prisoners confined to quarries, where “they suffered everything which one could imagine might be suffered by men imprisoned in such a place.” “To the victors,” wrote Thucydides, the Sicilian expedition was “the most brilliant of successes, to the vanquished the most calamitous of defeats; for they were utterly and entirely defeated; their sufferings were on an enormous scale; their losses were, as they say, total: army, navy, everything was destroyed.”

The lessons taught by Thucydides have not lost their timeliness, and his project for a scientific history has been taken up again and again. As a historian, he was true to the central presupposition of Greek philosophy, that the truest knowledge must be of the unchanging. Asserting his belief that human nature is “what it is,” he warned that the situations he described would arise repeatedly and expressed his hope that his analysis would prove useful to future statesmen.

One of the puzzles in the history of historiography is why the brilliant beginnings of the Greek tradition exhausted themselves. Herodotus and Thucydides had no successors, only continuators who tried to bridge the chronological gap between the two historians or to continue the story beyond the end of Thucydides’ texts. These efforts barely rose above the levels of annals, and the authors showed neither the critical skill nor the literary power of their great predecessors. Xenophon (c. 430–350 BCE) was among those who attempted a continuation, but his more valuable contributions were in biography. Although history writing was still done in the Hellenistic Age (323 BCE–330 CE), there was little improvement.

Roman historiography

Polybius

The Romans inherited Greek historiography as they inherited other elements of Greek culture, aware of its prestige and emulating it in some ways but inevitably giving it the imprint of their quite different temperament. Fittingly, it was a Greek writing in Greek, Polybius (c. 200–c. 118 BCE), who first offered key insights into the development of the Roman state and discussed aspects of Roman society that the Romans themselves had hardly noticed. He asked: “Can anyone be so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means, and under what kind of polity, almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and brought under the domination of the single city of Rome, and that too within a period of not quite 53 years?” In answering this question, Polybius drew comparisons between the Romans and the Greeks, the latter of whom failed to forge a lasting empire, even under Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE). The primary reason for Rome’s success, according to Polybius, was the Roman character, as reflected in statesmanship, public spirit, and moderation toward defeated peoples.

Polybius also argued that Roman political institutions were superior to Greek ones. He accepted the theory of the cyclical degeneration and regeneration of Greek city-states, which had been elaborated by Aristotle. This theory maintained that city-states develop first as despotisms and evolve through periods of monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy and finally mob rule before the restoration of order in a new despotism. There was, however, nothing inevitable about this cycle, and Polybius at one time believed that the Romans might avert it because the constitution of the Roman Republic was mixed, allowing for some monarchical and some popular elements as well as the aristocracy of the Senate. (This theory of the benefits of mixed government was to have a long career.) Finally, Polybius believed the Romans had been favoured by Tyche (“fate” or “fortune”), which was partly responsible for drawing the world under Roman rule.

Like Thucydides, Polybius relied on personal experience and the cross-examination of eyewitnesses. Thus, he retraced the route of the Carthaginian general Hannibal across the Alps and observed the siege of Carthage in 146 BCE. Although he scorned historians who merely sat in their studies, he also condemned petty histories of small corners of the world. To the contrary, the triumph of Rome called for a universal history: “Up to this time the world’s history had been, so to speak, a series of disconnected transactions.…But from this time forth History becomes a connected whole: the affairs of Italy and Libya are involved with those of Asia and Greece, and the tendency of all is to unity.”

Diodorus, Sallust, and Livy

Unfortunately, a method based on personal experience and eyewitness accounts could capture a moment of decisive conquest but could not yield universal history. It remained for Diodorus Siculus in the 1st century BCE to come closest, among ancient writers, to this ideal. Diodorus traced to 60 BCE the histories of Arabs, Assyrians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Greeks, Indians, Romans, and Scythians—not to mention Amazons and the residents of Atlantis. He is one of the main ancient supporters of the claim that Plato and other Greek thinkers learned their wisdom from the Egyptians.

Less than a century after Polybius explained the rise of the Roman state, Roman historians were beginning to speak of its decline. Sallust (c. 86–c. 35/34 BCE) described the conspiracy of the Roman patrician Catiline in the Bellum Catilinae (43–42 BCE; Catiline’s War), and his Bellum Jugurthinum (41–40 BCE; The Jugurthine War) focused on the war against Jugurtha, the king of Numida (roughly present-day Algeria). The lesson of both was that the republic was rotting inwardly through corruption and the arrogance of power. Indeed, in Sallust’s systematic analysis Rome was shown to be suffering the general fate of empires.

Livy (59/64 BCE–17 CE), one of the greatest Roman historians, lived through the fall of the republic and the establishment of the principate by Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Like Sallust, Livy was inclined to idealize the severe virtues of republican Rome. His monumental history, most of which has not survived, starts with the founding of the city and extends into the rule of Augustus. Like the Aeneid, by the Roman poet Virgil, Livy’s work served to memorialize Rome’s early history just as the republic was being transformed into an empire.

Tacitus

Nobody was more aware of this development, or decline, than Tacitus (56–120). His two great works—the Annals, which covers the years 14–68 CE, and the Histories, which begins with the famous “year of the four emperors” (69 CE) and ends with the death of the emperor Domitian (96)—provide an important account of the first century of the principate. Tacitus was a self-conscious stylist, and in his treatise on style he claimed that styles were themselves the product of historical changes rather than being entirely the decision of the historian. His own writing is perhaps most remarkable for his concise epigrams. Of the short-lived reign of the emperor Galba, for example, Tacitus wrote: “Capax imperium, nisi imperasset” (“He would have been capable of ruling, except that he ruled”). And concerning Roman methods of pacification, he observed, “Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appelant” (“They have made a desert and call it peace”).

Politics, as it had been known in the republic, no longer existed; the intrigues of the imperial family and of its bodyguard, the Praetorian Guard, determined the fate of Rome. Instead of creating a master narrative about the impersonal forces that might have led to this development, as Polybius or even Sallust might have done, Tacitus focused on the character of the various emperors. As was typical of ancient authors, he had no conception of character as developing through the course of a lifetime. Innate character, however, reveals itself fully only in crises, or when the possession of absolute power allows all its latent features to emerge—as with the vanity and cruelty of Nero. Tacitus’s emphasis upon character, despite the crudity of his psychological theories, made him a pioneer of psychohistory. It also brought the form of historical works close to that of multiple biographies.

Suetonius and Plutarch

This is even more true of the De vita Caesarum (Lives of the Caesars), written by Suetonius in the 2nd century. His treatments consist of an account of each emperor’s administrative and military accomplishments followed by a description of his character and personal life. Although Suetonius, a former imperial secretary, drew upon the imperial archives in composing his Lives, the work is best known for the scandalous details it provides regarding the private lives of the emperors. In this he differed from the best-known of the ancient biographers, Plutarch, whose Bioi paralloi (Parallel Lives) juxtaposed the life stories of 24 Romans and 24 Greeks who had faced similar experiences. His purpose was to draw moral lessons from the lives of these figures. If they responded differently to their challenges, it was partly a consequence of character, but weaknesses of character could—and should—be overcome by a strenuous exercise of virtue.

Despite its origins in Greek historical thought, Roman historiography was in many ways more like Chinese than Greek historiography. The Romans lacked the speculative interests of the Greeks, and their historians made little effort to propound grand or even middle-range theories. This is one reason why they were content for so long with the annalistic form. The Romans of the republic had scarcely less regard for their ancestors than the Chinese did, and both believed that histories should propound moral lessons. Indeed, this was one of the Roman legacies to medieval Christian historiography.

Medieval historiography

The early Christian conception of history

The earliest Christians thought that history was about to end, because Jesus had said that some of his disciples would still be alive at his Second Coming. Fired with such apocalyptic expectations, all they needed to know of history was that God had broken into it through the Incarnation and that Jesus had conquered death through the Resurrection. Thus, it was hardly inevitable that Christians would develop an interest in history, much less their own philosophy of history. But the authors of the canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) regarded the Hebrew Bible as authoritative and reinterpreted it to accord with the new revelation. In their view many prophecies of the Hebrew scriptures referred to Jesus, and many of its stories prefigured his life (thus, Jonah’s three-day sojourn in the belly of the great fish was a foreshadowing of the Resurrection).

Incorporation of the Hebrew Bible into the Christian canon helped to shape the Christian conception of history. By tracing their history to Adam and Eve and the other figures who preceded Abraham, Christians encompassed all of humanity within their worldview. Reflecting the influence of the Hebrew prophets, the early Christians held that sins were inevitably followed by divine punishment and that the plot of history was the unfolding of God’s will for humanity. Disasters represented punishment for sins; prosperity indicated divine favour to faithful humans. Thus, nothing could happen that could not be explained by the providential interpretation of history.

Nevertheless, the idea of providence did not instantly solve all historical problems, some of which were peculiar to Christianity. In particular, what was the place of the Roman Empire in the divine plan? For almost three centuries Christians provoked in Roman authorities puzzlement, exasperation, and intermittent persecution. For their part, Christians treated the empire as at best irrelevant and at worst (as in the Revelation to John) as one of the beasts of the apocalypse. But with the conversion of the emperor Constantine in 312, Christian historians had to come to terms with the historical significance of a Christian emperor. The challenge was met by Eusebius, whose Historia ecclesiastica (written 312–324; Ecclesiastical History) was the first important work of Christian history since the Acts of the Apostles. For Eusebius, the Roman Empire was the divinely appointed and necessary milieu for the propagation of the Christian faith. Roman peace and Roman roads allowed the Apostle Paul to travel tens of thousands of miles on his evangelical journeys, and now Constantine had been appointed to end the persecution of Christians.

Augustine

The sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 posed a severe challenge to Eusebius’s interpretation of history. The most famous response was the monumental De civitate Dei contra paganos (413–426/427; City of God) of St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430). Augustine was forced to confront the argument that the establishment of Christianity as the state religion of Rome had led to the downfall of the empire. His rebuttal dissolved the identity of empire and Christianity. Humanity was composed of two cities, inextricably mixed: the earthly, built on self-love, and the heavenly, animated by the love of God. Only at the Last Judgment would the two be separated. Whatever human glory (or disaster) might attend the earthly city paled in significance compared to the denouement awaiting the heavenly city. Although this vast work (Isidore of Sevilla [c. 560–636] said that anyone who claimed to have read all of it was lying) had great influence, especially in periodizing history, it offered little help to historians who wished to write about the affairs of the earthly city.

The issue of periodization was vital. Augustine divided history into six ages, comparable to the six ages of the individual human life span: from Adam and Eve to the biblical Flood, from the Flood to Abraham, from Abraham to King David, from David to the Babylonian Exile, from the Exile to Jesus, and from Jesus to the Second Coming. Augustine’s disciple Paulus Orosius complicated this scheme by introducing apocalyptic material from the Book of Daniel, which was construed as prophesying four kingdoms, the last of which was the Roman Empire. The end of this kingdom would be the end of the world.

Early Germanic and English histories

The fall of the Roman Empire actually resulted from the successful attempt of Germanic peoples to occupy its lands and enjoy its benefits. Goths, Lombards, Franks, and other Germanic peoples carved out new kingdoms from the moribund Western empire and adopted its traditions and even its identity. Yet there were difficulties in fitting the Germanic invaders into this pattern. They were nonliterate and preserved their memories of the past orally in heroic poems such as Beowulf. Historical writing was almost all done by clerics, in Latin. Gregory of Tours (538/539–594), for example, wrote Ten Books of Histories, a history of the Franks from the perspective of the old Gallo-Roman aristocracy, and St. Bede the Venerable (672/673–735) composed the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People). For both authors, the invaders, once converted to orthodox (Roman) Christianity, were instrumental in repressing heresy: the Franks opposed Arianism (which held that Christ was not divine but created), and the Anglo-Saxons suppressed the irregular practices of the Celtic church.

Chronicles and hagiographies

Although Gregory and Bede wrote histories, early medieval historiography typically took one of two other forms: chronicles and hagiographies, or lives of saints. The spare nature of the earliest chronicles is illustrated by the following excerpt from the chronicle of St. Gall monastery in Switzerland:

720 Charles fought against the Saxons.721 Theudo drove the Saxons out of Aquitaine.722 Great crops.723 724 No entries.725 Saracens came for the first time.726 727 728 729 730 No entries.731 Blessed Bede, the presbyter, died.732 Charles fought against the Saracens at Poitiers on Saturday.

Even this rudimentary example, however, exhibits typical characteristics of early medieval chronicles. Only events—human deeds and natural prodigies—are listed. There is no effort to show any causal relationship between them—its style is what rhetoricians call “paratactic” (typically, clauses are simply connected by “and”) rather than “hypotactic” (when subordinate conjunctions such as “since” or “therefore” show some sort of relationship between clauses). Although history is presented only in terms of human actions, the absence of causal language makes agency appear limited. Bizarre occurrences in nature are included merely as oddities. For the early medieval chroniclers, the cosmos was bound up in a network of resemblances: bestiaries praised animals for their quasi-human virtues (e.g., elephants for chastity and bees for industry) and plants owed healing powers to their likeness to parts of the body (walnuts were eaten for disorders of the brain). It was therefore significant when fountains oozed blood or clouds assumed symbolic shapes, since they were indications of the divine will.

Chronicles became richer in the later Middle Ages. They proved to be invaluable resources to later historians, especially in cases in which the chronicler had personal knowledge of the events recorded. The Greater Chronicle of Matthew Paris (died 1259) marks the culmination of the chronicle tradition. Indeed, it seemed so comprehensive that virtually all subsequent English chroniclers confined themselves to copying it. Paris made only one trip outside England and spent most of his time in the monastery of St. Albans. Yet he was well-informed about Western European as well as English history. He seems to have acquired this knowledge partly through his access to a vast number of previous chronicles and state papers and partly through his interaction with the many visitors who stayed at the monastery, including friars who had traveled on the continent. Paris combined his comprehensive knowledge with a lively writing style, which was modeled in some ways on classical historians (for example, he used invented speeches).

Reporting what actually happened was not necessarily the primary goal of even the best chroniclers. Emulation or imitation was valued, and criticism of sources was usually subordinated to copying. Nevertheless, changes in consciousness gradually developed as the Middle Ages wore on. Hagiographies increasingly began to resemble modern biographies, as their writers took more interest in the individuality and development of their characters. The chronicle form disappeared in the 15th century.

As chroniclers recognized human actions, rather than impersonal forces, as the stuff of history, it is not surprising that biography flourished, especially hagiography, or saints’ lives. The genre conventionally included details of the saint’s childhood, the miracles he performed, and his eventual martyrdom. Understanding of individual character was much less important than the moral lessons and encouragement conveyed by the story.

New forms

Two writers who in very different ways pointed to new forms of historiography were Otto of Freising (c. 1111–58) and Geoffrey of Villehardouin (c. 1150–c. 1213). Otto, the uncle of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, had received the best education available in his time, which meant studying dialectic and theology in Paris (perhaps under the theologian and philosopher Peter Abelard). Because history was not regularly taught in medieval schools or universities, it is not surprising that Otto adopted a more philosophical approach in his Chronica sive historia de duabus civitatibus (“Chronicle or History of the Two Cities”). As its title indicates, the work was inspired by Augustine. Beginning, as many chronicles did, with the Creation and ending in 1146, it reflects abundantly on the miseries of “wars and tottering kingdoms.” Otto, like Orosius, identified the City of God with the church. Yet the Chronicle deals with ecclesiastical affairs with remarkable objectivity, considering Otto’s kinship with the German emperors. He describes the Investiture Controversy between the German ruler Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII and states arguments both for and against the so-called Donation of Constantine (an 8th-century forgery that came to be the basis for papal claims to temporal power). Although he prudently avoids giving unnecessary offense, he defends writing that might anger his predecessors, because “it is better to fall into the hands of men than to abandon the function of a historian by covering up a loathsome sight by colours that conceal the truth.”

Otto participated in the Second Crusade (1146–48) but did not write about it. The Crusades raised interpretative problems that historians had not faced before. Because nothing like the Crusades had ever happened, they posed new issues of historical causality. They brought Europeans into massive—though not invariably hostile—contact with Islamic civilization, and they inspired new kinds of historical writing. Villehardouin, a French nobleman and military commander, was an eyewitness of the Fourth Crusade (1201–04). His Conquête de Constantinople (The Conquest of Constantinople) was the first sustained work of French prose and one of the first great memoirs in French.

Precisely because Villehardouin did not know how histories “ought” to be written, however, his work lacked the conventional preface modestly declaring the author’s lack of ability. His history is basically the memoir of a successful commander. It is free of the moral reflections beloved of monks and the rhetorical effusions indulged in by emulators of the Latin historians. With Villehardouin a new voice—vivacious, conventionally pious but impatient of theological niceties, and keenly interested in military and political strategies—entered historical discourse.

Islamic historiography

The Qurʾān, the sacred text of Islam, contains allusions that constitute the basis of a providential history of humankind from Adam through Muhammad, the founder of Islam. Another valuable resource for Islamic historians is the Ḥadīth (the traditions or sayings of Muhammad), which is arranged in such a way that lines of transmission can be traced back to those who knew the Prophet. Chains of authorities were thus integral to early Islamic theology and historiography, which naturally lent themselves to annalistic treatment.

Al-Ṭabarī and Rashīd al-Dīn

The greatest early Islamic historian, al-Ṭabarī (839–923), was reputed to have memorized the Qurʾān at the age of seven. Legend credited him with producing a 30,000-page commentary on the Qurʾān and an equally long universal history (both survive but are only one-tenth as long). His chief virtues as a historian were his accurate chronology and his scrupulous faithfulness in reproducing authorities. Like Christian annalists, he depended on the Hebrew Bible (as interpreted by Islam), though the world he inhabited was basically Egypt and Muslim Asia rather than Western Christendom. The Persian scholar Rashīd al-Dīn (1247–1318) composed a more truly universal history, Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh (“Collector of Chronicles”), which covered not only the Islamic world (which by then extended from Spain to northern India) but also included data on the popes and emperors of Europe and on Mongolia and China.

Ibn Khaldūn

The sophistication of Islamic historical thought was dramatically illustrated by the Muqaddimah (“Introduction”) of the Arab historian Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406). This introductory volume of a universal history reveals Khaldūn’s ideas about history—something chroniclers hardly ever did. The subjects Khaldūn considered in his work include historical method, geography, culture, economics, public finance, population, society and state, religion and politics, and the social context of knowledge. Khaldūn held high office and was often exiled or imprisoned. Late in his life he had the opportunity to discuss history with the Mongol emperor Timur the Lame, who was besieging Damascus. Timur wrote his own memoirs, and he was evidently interested not only in what Khaldūn knew about North Africa but also in his philosophy of history.

Khaldūn lived with the Bedouins of North Africa and in the sophisticated Muslim cities of Granada and Cairo. These experiences were the source of one of his main ideas: that humans first lived in Bedouin tribes and then achieved civilization, but civilization became decadent with increasing wealth and luxury. No dynasty or civilization, he believed, could maintain vitality for more than four generations (though the only example he gives is the decline of the Israelites after Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph). Khaldūn contrasted his writing with “surface history,” which was “no more than information about political events” and was used to “entertain large, crowded gatherings.” Historians of his day, he thought, were too credulous in accepting tradition. As for their frequent moralizing about the misconduct of certain caliphs, Khaldūn asserted that people like to justify their own misconduct by looking in histories for examples of the great who have done the same things. To reach the “inner meaning” of history, the historian had to be “speculative” and give “subtle explanations” of causes. To accomplish this, history had to be rooted in philosophy—or, as Khaldūn said of his own work, it had to be a new and original science.